10 Indian Health-Tech Startups To Watch In 2016

Indian healthcare is on ventilator. Trust me, I’m not exaggerating. About 930 million Indians currently own cell phones, but have no access to clean water. Isn’t that just a little sad? Further, the country has no central regulatory authority for health services, as most of the citizens are uninsured. In order for India to able to catch up to the ‘more developed nations,’ the country will have to shell out about as much as $50 billion just on hospital beds.

Filling this long gap between the citizens and the healthcare facilities are the various upcoming digital startups. Since nowadays almost everyone has a smartphone, these digital startups have been established with an aim of utilising this digital boom in making healthcare facilities available to each and every person owning a mobile headset.

In order to end the year on a healthy note, we at IndianWeb2.com have made a list of 10 Indian health-technology startups that made wave in the year 2015 and one should probably watch out in the year to come.

One of India’s fastest growing healthcare platform, Practo was founded by Abhinav Lal and Shashank ND in the year 2008. For the unaware, Practo offers doctors new and innovative ways to highlight their practice and reach to new target patients and ultimately increase their revenue by offering them online consultations. Attacking issues of visibility and growth from the ground up, Practo not only brings users to points-of-care more efficiently, but its tools allow doctors the opportunity to run their clinics like businesses so doctors can solely focus on healing patients and the business takes care of itself.

Currently present in 35 cities in the country, the company plans to extend its network to about 100 Indian cities and 10 countries over the period of next six months by the means of further development and acquisitions.

Founded in the year 2013, the platform aims to address care accessibility through the two Ts, telemedicine and transparency. The users are provided with a choice to choose from over eighty thousand vetted doctors, see the fee amount and pay for the live consultation. This ends up saving up-to 70% of the patients time and other expenses.

Bengaluru-based OmiX Labs is developing a platform that allows for cost-effective DNA testing for pathogens, outside of laboratory settings. This platform is being developed for use in diagnosis and management of infectious diseases, food testing, and water and environmental testing. The startup is currently funded through the Biotechnology Ignition Grant from the Indian Government.

The platform is a sincere effort to make healthcare accessible to everyone irrespective of class, caste and gender etc. The startup has given birth to an in-home healthcare program in order to help those suffering from acute and chronic illnesses. Using it, Post-op patients can have doctors, specialists or physical therapists visit their homes along with transportable and reliable equipments. Along with addressing the important accessibility issue, the startup is also chipping in for expanding the resources pool available in the country.

Started by Indian School of Business Alumni, KiviHealth is making next generation cloud based healthcare solution for doctors & patients. The team is composed of engineers from DA-IICT and MSU, the topmost engineering colleges of Gujarat. The Ahmedabad-based startup aims to provide an affordable,patient-centric,digital health information management system that can be used across multiple clinics,hospitals,labs and pharmacies.

With a vision for “One Patient,One Record”, KiviHealth provides patients with access to their health information,brings more clarity to medical management and enable doctors to make superior medical decisions.

The platform takes the charge of aggregating a patients’ medical records, data, doctors’ reports and test results. It then stores them securely so that they can be conveniently accessed. In order to make things more efficient and enable doctors to spend more face time with the patients, the portal has CRM features and good practice management tools.

Established in 2013, this Pune-based startup can prove to be of great help to the medical device, insurance and pharmaceutical companies entering the Indian market or looking to grow their base in an efficient way of reaching the patients.

As the name suggests, the 2012 established startup aims to connect blood donors with those in need. But, SocialBlood is unlike any other blood aggregating organisation. It aims to solve the blood availability crisis by making use of the huge popularity of the social networking site Facebook. The startup does so by aggregating the data in real-time, highlighting the locations according to the need of blood and locating potential blood donor matches on a map. This way, the startup maximizes the efficiency of procurement in terms of both, cost and time.

Founded by Vibhav Joshi & Sumedh Kaulgud, this unique startup addresses the importance issues infant and maternal mortality. In an effort to deal with these two important issues, the startup has developed a non-invasive device that has the capability to correctly collect physiological data making the monitoring maternal and fetal health much easier than earlier. The device developed by the startup is easily transportable 2-pound device that has the potential to assist in saving up to 300,000 lives every year.

The platform aims to be a one-stop shop for all healthcare needs. The app has been designed in order to store patient’s health records, track medication and adherence. The app even monitors family member wellness and allows consumers to easily make doctor appointments. Being one of the first EMR platforms on the market, the Pune based startup has a huge potential to be successful.

Founded by Asha Satapathy & Ahimanikya Satapathy in the year 2013, DocEngage is a platform aiming to standardise procedures across clinics and helping users assess inventories across different locations in a country in order to help them better manage resources. It further integrates additional sources of revenue for the clinics through upselling. The platform even provides a high patient engagement level through the means of loyalty and membership programs, hence not straining clinics’ resources.

The startup has recently partnered with StartupHealth, a New York based health incubator. This partnership has not only resulted in the startup’s number of partner clinics grow from a mere four locations to a whopping 25 locations but has also led to a 40% reduction in overall costs reported.